I have been thinking that maybe modern programming languages should move away from supporting IEEE 754 all within one data type.
Like, we’ve figured out that having a null value for everything always is a terrible idea. Instead, we’ve started encoding potential absence into our type system with Option or Result types, which also encourages dealing with such absence at the edges of our program, where it should be done.
Well, NaN is null all over again. Instead, we could make the division operator an associated function which returns a Result<f64> and disallow f64 from ever being NaN.
My main concern is interop with the outside world. So, I guess, there would still need to be a IEEE 754 compliant data type. But we could call it ieee_754_f64 to really get on the nerves of anyone wanting to use it when it’s not strictly necessary.
Well, and my secondary concern, which is that AI models would still want to just calculate with tons of floats, without error-handling at every intermediate step, even if it sometimes means that the end result is a shitty vector of NaNs, that would be supported with that, too.